Capabilities of Natural language processing

Natural language processing has many real-world applications that benefit the lives of humans. These applications fall under three broad capabilities of natural language processing:

• Speech Recognition

  The machine is able to recognize a natural language in its spoken form and translate it into a textual form. An example of this is dictation on your smartphones – you can enable dictation and speak to your phone, and it will convert whatever you are saying into text.

• Natural Language Understanding

  The machine is able to understand a natural language in both its spoken and written form. If given a command, the machine is able to understand and execute it. An example of this would be saying 'Hey Siri, call home' to Siri on your iPhone for Siri to automatically call 'home' for you.

• Natural Language Generation

  The machine is able to generate natural language itself. An example of this is asking 'Siri, what time is it?' to Siri on your iPhone and Siri replying with the time – 'It's 2:08pm'.

These three capabilities are used to accomplish and automate a lot of tasks. Let's take a look at some of the things natural language processing contributes to, and how.

Note

Textual data is known as corpora (plural) and a corpus (singular).